…at the LARB.  He does a very good job capturing why so many philosophers (I among them) never warmed to Cavell.  An excerpt:

In 1980, [Cavell's book The Claim of Reason] was the subject of a symposium at the American Philosophical Society (at which I was present); the occasion proved a fiasco for Cavell. Barry Stroud, a distinguished epistemologist and former Berkeley colleague, offered a careful, penetrating examination and critique of Cavell’s approach to skepticism and to Cavell’s use of the concepts of acceptance and acknowledgment. Cavell responded abusively and unprofessionally to Stroud’s highly professional, respectful paper. In reflecting on the event, Cavell concludes that his work creates infectious ill will among an imposing body of philosophers who know of it.

I believe Stroud bore Cavell no ill will and displayed none on this occasion, but there are certainly many who have been put off reading Cavell by the eccentricities of his prose and the obstacles put in the way of gaining a clear understanding of his arguments and positions. This is true even of many who acknowledge the fact that he is also capable of great eloquence and deep insight. I believe Cavell paid a great price for persuading himself, as he says in the memoir, that one can no more choose how one writes than one can choose what makes one happy. This is a preposterous claim and one that an Emersonian friend (editor, analyst, professional colleague) might have helped him abandon.

Many, especially philosophers, who aspire to impersonality in their work are offended by the insistent foregrounding of self in Cavell’s writing. Some are also allergic to the craving for profundity he frequently exhibits. (Austin regarded this impulse as the mortal enemy of philosophy.) Is it helpful or simply pretentious to invoke Kant’s metaphysics in explicating the barrier screen in It Happened One Night (1934)? Cavell’s convoluted sentences frequently run 60 to 80 words in length; the main text of The Claim of Reason begins with a sentence 216 words long. Not surprisingly, his grammar has been found unstable and his intent often obscure. Asides, parentheses, and extended fragments constitute frequent distractions and diversions. His 17 published volumes are repetitious and their frequent reformulations confusing. One reason for this is that Cavell would not let go of intuitions, allowing them into print before they had been satisfactorily refined, elaborated, or defended — before, as he says, the intuitions had been transformed into Emersonian tuitions. This is true even of the concepts most central to his philosophy — skepticism and the ordinary.